Venezuela is Trump’s useful enemy

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free

Is Donald Trump planning to overthrow Venezuela’s regime? Putting three US destroyers, an amphibious assault ship, a guided-missile cruiser, a nuclear-powered attack submarine and a squadron of F35s under Venezuela’s nose certainly looks that way. That includes 6,500 navy and marine personnel. No drugs seizure operation needs such back up. Then again, Trump does extravagant things for performative reasons. Ask the almost 800 US generals and admirals summoned from around the world to listen to him ramble last week. Right now, Venezuela is Trump’s Schrödinger’s war; it is neither happening nor not happening. But open conflict is a hair’s breadth away.

Venezuela is irresistibly tempting to Trump as an enemy. Its role in his mind is as chief instigator of turmoil in America’s urban “war zones” where he has deployed troops — Memphis, Chicago and Portland being the latest (following Los Angeles and Washington DC). The military raid on a Chicago apartment block last week targeted Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that Trump says is run by Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s thuggish kleptocrat. There is little evidence to suggest the gang answers to Maduro. But Tren de Aragua is the domestic side of the Trump coin on which Venezuela is the foreign.

Venezuela is nowhere close to being America’s leading narcotics supplier. Yet Trump and Pete Hegseth, his compulsively strutting self-branded “secretary of war”, insist that the country is fuelling America’s opioid epidemic. None — repeat none — of America’s fentanyl has been found to originate from Venezuela. Almost all of it comes from Mexico. Colombia is America’s largest source of cocaine. Four times in recent weeks the US has blown alleged Venezuelan smuggling boats out of the Caribbean water, claiming more than 20 lives. Trump said that bags of fentanyl and cocaine were “splattered all over the ocean”. No evidence was provided.

To give Trump his due, no evidence is necessary. The flimsiest pretexts will do. The US supreme court has put up scant resistance to Trump so far. It is inconceivable it would act as a stronger check on him abroad than on his war at home. The president, in other words, can make this up as he goes along. Every time a Venezuelan boat gets blown up, Trump claims to be saving 25,000 American lives. Last year 54,743 Americans were killed by opioids. Even if you accepted Trump’s far higher claim of 300,000 annual US opioid deaths, 12 Venezuelan speed boats would account for all of them. He is not even pretending to phone it in.

The best guess is that Trump is not yet decided on whether he will strike Venezuela directly. Some around him, notably Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, are gunning for regime change. Others, including Richard Grenell, who is both Trump’s Venezuela envoy and his president of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (among the strangest dual hats in history), prefer to negotiate. Both are aware that Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Pam Bondi, the US attorney-general, recently doubled the bounty on Maduro’s head to $50mn. The stage for a performative Trump war is set.

Trump has no inter-agency policy process. His “administration” consists of loyalists competing with each other to be more Trumpian than the next. This works when they know what Trump wants. Sometimes they guess wrongly. In July Hegseth halted US weapons shipments to Ukraine only to discover that Trump did not yet want that. He suffered a humiliating reversal. Since then Hegseth has been falling over himself to please Trump, including ordering four televised strikes on unidentified Venezuelan boats. Trump is so pleased with the optics of these apparently risk-free fireworks that he seems to be developing a taste for them.

The danger is that Trump also sees escalation as a freebie. Maduro is a vile strongman and a client of both Russia and China. Few Venezuelans would mourn his demise. Yet they would fight against Yankee imperialism. That Trump’s “maximum pressure” on Venezuela drives up its huge outflow of migrants, including to America, is one of those ironies. Trump is fuelling the problem he claims to be tackling. This only makes sense if he is less than truthful about his true aim.

The movie Wag the Dog depicted a US administration concocting a fake war to distract from domestic woes. Trump’s twist on that plot is to stage the fake war at home while lining up a foreign country for a co-starring role.

[email protected]

Read the full article here